If you know who Robert Christgau is...what do you think of his reviews?

[Nowarezman]

I have massively mixed feelings about the album reviews by Christgau.  From enthusiastic agreement to "this review is morally reprehensible", depending.  And all shades between.  

 

Do you read his reviews?  Any insights, likes, dislikes, comments, etc.?

 

My one specific comment to offer is - after reading some hundreds of his reviews since the 60s, I suspected, but didn't positively know, that Christgau was not a musician of any sort.  He just seems to never talk about the kinds of things musicians tend to notice or particularly appreciate or deprecate in music - at least it seemed that way to me.  This was confirmed to me in his own words in one of his articles about his career as a music reviewer. 

 

Whatever my gripes about him, I do think he's worth reading.  He now can be found still churning out reviews via Substack.  Here's a link: And It Don't Stop | Robert Christgau

 

nat

 

[MathOfInsects]

He reviewed me twice. Neither one is in my promo materials, if you knowmsayin’.

[Nowarezman]

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

He reviewed me twice. Neither one is in my promo materials, if you knowmsayin’.

So you belong to the club that includes James Taylor, Billy Joel, Joe Walsh, Eric Burdon, Carly Simon, Simon & Garfunkel, Chicago, Steve Winwood, etc etc - it's a big club with a lot of familiar artists that are in general respected to some degree by most other critics.  Although for a while there, it did seem there was a lot of piling on James Taylor by critics - mostly of the "what have you done for me lately?" or the "he didn't write his own biggest hit"  sort. (Ok, Sinatra didn't either - so what?)   But I can't see how Christgau can pan Sweet Baby James and moon over Joni Mitchell's Blue at the same time.  There's a lot of similarity and overlap on those two albums - they make a great pairing. 

 

I have a hard time getting my head around his musical compass - what his North Star is, or is a conglomeration of.  But I still get good leads on new stuff from him - and I can forgive a lot of what looks like self-contradiction at least to me.  But the insults...he goes off the rails every now and then and simply spits in some musician's face for sins such as being overweight or too stupid to deserve anything but contempt.  

 

OTOH, if you read just his B+ and above rated album reviews...he's pretty great.

 

nat

 

[BMD]

He's just a guy with an opinion. I don't give a shit what he thinks. I like what I like, regardless of what others think

[Anderton]

57 minutes ago, BMD said:

He's just a guy with an opinion. I don't give a shit what he thinks. I like what I like, regardless of what others think.

 

As a person who reviews stuff, I have very definite ideas about the subject. I believe that my opinion should not be of any interest to anyone. My goal is to describe something so accurately that people can decide for themselves whether they would find what's being reviewed useful or not. Sometimes different people will read the same review, with some thinking it's a negative review and others thinking it's a positive review. That simply correlates to whether they're interested in what's being reviewed or not. I do fold opinions into my reviews, but they're just a veneer to keep the writing from getting too dry.

 

It's harder to be objective with music, but not impossible. In that case, IMO what matters to me is whether the reviewer likes the same kind of music I do. If so, then maybe the reviewer will find something I would not have found otherwise, but I'll take a chance on it based on the person's track record.

 

Any reviewer who's so full of themselves that they think people should take what they say as gospel is delusional. I think Bob Lefsetz's reviews are worth reading because he gives context to the music, explains why HE likes it, and gives links so you can check out what he's talking about if you're interested. He has definite preferences that don't always line up with mine, but he's also capable of keeping an open mind. My last two album projects weren't his kind of music, but he really liked them for what they were. He can appreciate music that's outside of his comfort zone instead of saying "I don't like it, therefore it's not good."

[Nowarezman]

I'm totally on board with your comments, Craig.

 

I love reading good reviews, discussing music (and other arts) with others who also like such discussions.  I learn a lot, I get stretched a bit.  I don't like to be clueless, just sitting in my own bubble of like and dislikes, careless of what anyone else thinks.  

 

I feel the whole "subjective vs objective" thing gets out of hand when it comes to tastes, appreciations, criticism of the arts.  I mean if 100,000 people all "subjectively" like some song or other, I think we've passed out of the bubble of individual subjectivity and into dealing with something shared and social, with elements that resonate in common with a lot of other folks.  Those elements can be defined, discussed, refined, etc.   That seems to me to be getting somewhat into "objective" territory. I'm not sure the two categories work as entirely exclusive concepts.

 

There are some folks who identify "objective" with "absolute".  There's even some dictionary definitions along the same lines.  I prefer to think of "objective" meaning "something that can be perceived by more than one person, suggesting an independent phenomenological existence of some sort".   But for me, discussing shared subjective perceptions is for the purpose of refining and expanding perceptions of provisionally defined objects, definitions, concepts, structures, etc., not for the purpose of reaching static and blind absolutes.

 

nat

 

 

 

[KuruPrionz]

2 hours ago, Nowarezman said:

I'm totally on board with your comments, Craig.

 

I love reading good reviews, discussing music (and other arts) with others who also like such discussions.  I learn a lot, I get stretched a bit.  I don't like to be clueless, just sitting in my own bubble of like and dislikes, careless of what anyone else thinks.  

 

I feel the whole "subjective vs objective" thing gets out of hand when it comes to tastes, appreciations, criticism of the arts.  I mean if 100,000 people all "subjectively" like some song or other, I think we've passed out of the bubble of individual subjectivity and into dealing with something shared and social, with elements that resonate in common with a lot of other folks.  Those elements can be defined, discussed, refined, etc.   That seems to me to be getting somewhat into "objective" territory. I'm not sure the two categories work as entirely exclusive concepts.

 

There are some folks who identify "objective" with "absolute".  There's even some dictionary definitions along the same lines.  I prefer to think of "objective" meaning "something that can be perceived by more than one person, suggesting an independent phenomenological existence of some sort".   But for me, discussing shared subjective perceptions is for the purpose of refining and expanding perceptions of provisionally defined objects, definitions, concepts, structures, etc., not for the purpose of reaching static and blind absolutes.

 

nat

 

 

 

I honestly don't think it is possible to have an objective viewpoint on Art and make no mistake - music is Art. 

My own tastes are wildly variable, I like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell but also "Lime in the Coconut" by Nilsson and all the early Little Richard hits and Beethoven's 9th and Trane, Monk and Mingus, folk music from Asia and Africa, Ravi Shankar etc. Classic children's songs are forever ingrained in my tiny brain, some I love and some I don't. Christmas carols, same thing - variable. 

 

If I don't like music, I just ignore it. No biggie. 

[Nowarezman]

15 hours ago, KuruPrionz said:

I honestly don't think it is possible to have an objective viewpoint on Art and make no mistake - music is Art. 

I almost agree - my take would be that it's not possible to have a totally objective viewpoint on Art.  I also don't think humans are capable of being totally objective about much of anything - myself as my own biggest case in point.

 

But if you can be partially objective while retaining the richness of individual subjective experience - the two modes interact and I believe there's a sort of dialectic possible.  That a rich subjective experience can expand one's objective perceptions, and the other way around also.  

 

That little card they place next to artworks at museums that often has a very short exposition about the art in front of you.  Sometimes the little card will have just a short phrase or concept that sets off a big lightbulb in my head and I "see" a whole lot in the art that I "saw but didn't see" before.  That type of experience is something I live for (among other things :).  Mere experience can be flat and unresponsive, waiting for some more objective concept to drop in and sort of make the experience bloom. 

 

I totally get it when I hear a lot of musicians just turn away, shaking their heads and refusing to consider any possible objectivity in art understanding.  I do the same when the critics and educators talk about any art as being describable in totally objective, absolute terms.  But I don't want the bad taste in my mouth left by such critics and educators to keep me from taking in more nuanced ideas and approaches to art as a sort of symbiotic form of perception that includes, or oscillates between, or what the hell, mysteriously  transcends, a pair of opposed, hard, mutually exclusive and rather hostile realms of subjective and objective modes.  

 

These terms are in any event, simply language placeholders, not things in themselves.  And all things are more complicated and deeper and more intermeshed than any net of language can pull up in its entirety out of the infinite modes of experience.  But it's still worth fishing for words!

 

nat

 

 

 

[KuruPrionz]

14 minutes ago, Nowarezman said:

I totally get it when I hear a lot of musicians just turn away, shaking their heads and refusing to consider any possible objectivity in art understanding. 

 

nat

 

 

 

We can agree to disagree.

Regarding Art in general, objectivity is more or less impossible for the human perception to parse. We are all subjective. FWIW, I am a musician but also a visual artist - photography, drawing, digital "painting" etc. I see things the way I see them and I can be influenced by the subjective opinions of others.

Art can never be objective, some mathematics can be objective, an earthquake is both objective (a thing that simply happened) and subjective (one person loses their home, another a thousand miles away glances at the newspaper article on the event). The variables are infinite, facts are facts but perception of facts is a different thing entirely. 

[Anderton]

What can be objective is an analysis like the one done in Spain. A team at the University of Barcelona looked at chord progressions and harmonic structure over popular music from the 50s to now:

 

According to a study conducted by Spanish scientists, melodies have become more similar over the past 50 years. The study analyzed songs released between 1955 and 2010 and found that the diversity of note combinations has consistently diminished in the last 50 years. The researchers also found that the timbral palette employed - the sounds of the instruments - has also grown narrower. 

 

However, quantifying something objectively doesn't correlate to a subjective reaction. Buddy Holly got a lot of enduring mileage out of three chords   What analysis can do is give a data point for why some people think "music used to be better." An analysis doesn't say that it was, of course. People will interpret the data subjectively, so we're back to where we started.

 

The other element that can be measured objectively is technical skill, for example, being able to play an instrument with accuracy and speed. But again, that doesn't correlate to a subjectively pleasing work of art. In fact, it could produce the opposite reaction. (As Emperor Joseph II said to Mozart, "And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.")

 

 

[Nowarezman]

Great examples, Craig.  I also think a musical tradition is an objective thing.  Very similar to a language.  The analogy can go a ways between music and language.  Languages have "rules" but they are really simply a bunch of usages about which there is consensus and they can change all the time.  You have to follow the "rules" more or less to simply say things others can understand who share the same consensual usages.

 

Thing is - our subjective reactions are much beholden to musical language usages that we have heard all our lives.  Our subjective reactions are attached in a way to the bits and bobs of one or more musical traditions that we've taken in by osmosis.  We tend to think of our likes and dislikes as some sort of emanation from our individual, unique selves - but really they are super-complicated responses and patternings that are triggered by the arbitrary inputs from our environments, upbringing, education, social experience, and so on and on.  All these objective "out there" things molding and informing the "in here" of each one of us.  

 

At the same time, there are innate abilities regarding music - something that is obvious in child prodigies and not so obvious in all the rest of us - but still there a lower level.  So it's complicated - this traffic between the objective and the subjective. 

 

To understand music, then, it helps to understand your musical understanding.  We have the ability to choose to enlarge our inner musical experiences by studying and exposing ourselves to exterior, objective cases of music and musical analysis, history, culture, etc. 

 

So I guess my big challenging statement here is that I believe pure subjectivity is also almost nothing in and of itself.  A "feeling" by itself is an almost subhuman thing with no voice or meaning unless it's mapped into a larger context of personal and social history.  Likewise, an objective "thing" that triggers no subjective mirroring experience is, well, as good as nothing as far as any individual is concerned.  There's something miraculous about something objective like the written score to a Bach Prelude, the way it connects otherwise closed-off subjective worlds. It's an analogy for life itself.  

 

Thanks to anyone with the patience to read my ramblings here - and I have no expectations of interesting anyone beyond perhaps a few like-minded sorts that process experiences and figure out what I think and even feel quite often by talking or writing socially.   

 

nat

 

[Ivan May]

Robert Christgau is a very good critic, but like so many, he can blast some really good albums. I remember when The Rolling Stones released Some Girls in 1978, and he, like so many other critics, trashed the album, and Miss You in particular.

[Anderton]

7 hours ago, Nowarezman said:

We tend to think of our likes and dislikes as some sort of emanation from our individual, unique selves - but really they are super-complicated responses and patternings that are triggered by the arbitrary inputs from our environments, upbringing, education, social experience, and so on and on.  All these objective "out there" things molding and informing the "in here" of each one of us.  

 

There's a strong correlation between music and memory. It may be that music we like triggers certain memories. The more universal the memory, the more people will like the music.

 

For example, my album "Take Me Back to Tomorrow," which one person classified as "tropical pop," was very well-received. But was it because of the music, or because it triggered memories of being on vacation?

 

[MathOfInsects]

9 hours ago, Anderton said:

What can be objective is an analysis like the one done in Spain. A team at the University of Barcelona looked at chord progressions and harmonic structure over popular music from the 50s to now:

 

According to a study conducted by Spanish scientists, melodies have become more similar over the past 50 years. The study analyzed songs released between 1955 and 2010 and found that the diversity of note combinations has consistently diminished in the last 50 years. The researchers also found that the timbral palette employed - the sounds of the instruments - has also grown narrower. 

 

 

I had a whole bunch of questions as soon as I read this, so I clicked through to get to the journal article. 

 

Sure enough, it's an open-access journal, not a peer-reviewed publication, and that "study" has essentially never been cited or replicated. It's sexy for newspapers and other mass-media to do stories about it, since it plays into the cultural insistence that "things were better back then," but IMO really doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of critical reading. 

It's basically an effort to--as you say--make an objective argument for a subjective belief. It falls apart almost instantly on any real examination.

[KenElevenShadows]

10 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

I had a whole bunch of questions as soon as I read this, so I clicked through to get to the journal article. 

 

Sure enough, it's an open-access journal, not a peer-reviewed publication, and that "study" has essentially never been cited or replicated. It's sexy for newspapers and other mass-media to do stories about it, since it plays into the cultural insistence that "things were better back then," but IMO really doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of critical reading. 

It's basically an effort to--as you say--make an objective argument for a subjective belief. It falls apart almost instantly on any real examination.

 

Out of curiosity, do you believe that the diversity of note combinations has remained the same (or increased) in the past 50 years? If so, why? Also, why does this study fall apart almost instantly upon any real examination?

 

Do you believe that because the journal is apparently not true simply because it's allegedly open-source and not peer-reviewed and not replicated? Do you suppose it's possible that it could be true even if all of the above is true?

 

Just curious. Thanks for your time.

[KuruPrionz]

21 hours ago, Anderton said:

What can be objective is an analysis like the one done in Spain. A team at the University of Barcelona looked at chord progressions and harmonic structure over popular music from the 50s to now:

 

According to a study conducted by Spanish scientists, melodies have become more similar over the past 50 years. The study analyzed songs released between 1955 and 2010 and found that the diversity of note combinations has consistently diminished in the last 50 years. The researchers also found that the timbral palette employed - the sounds of the instruments - has also grown narrower. 

 

However, quantifying something objectively doesn't correlate to a subjective reaction. Buddy Holly got a lot of enduring mileage out of three chords   What analysis can do is give a data point for why some people think "music used to be better." An analysis doesn't say that it was, of course. People will interpret the data subjectively, so we're back to where we started.

 

The other element that can be measured objectively is technical skill, for example, being able to play an instrument with accuracy and speed. But again, that doesn't correlate to a subjectively pleasing work of art. In fact, it could produce the opposite reaction. (As Emperor Joseph II said to Mozart, "And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.")

 

 

If you only look at melody and not at the structure of the beats, you will make one decision. I've heard lots of new and different beats as African, Middle Eastern, Caribbean, Asian and South American beats have become part and parcel of newer music. It's not that music is becoming simpler, it is that there are transitions to other aspects of complexity. Joni Mitchell and Queen both made a new and more complex structure of vocal harmonies more accessible. I don't listen enough to hear if that became part of the new 'ish" but I don't things overall are getting simpler, they are just changing in many ways and going by melody alone doesn't cover those changes. I could be wrong, I'm open to listening.  

[Anderton]

 

11 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

I had a whole bunch of questions as soon as I read this, so I clicked through to get to the journal article. 

 

Sure enough, it's an open-access journal, not a peer-reviewed publication, and that "study" has essentially never been cited or replicated. It's sexy for newspapers and other mass-media to do stories about it, since it plays into the cultural insistence that "things were better back then," but IMO really doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of critical reading. 

It's basically an effort to--as you say--make an objective argument for a subjective belief. It falls apart almost instantly on any real examination.

 

Did you read to the end of the original PDF paper? If not, the references cited in the footnotes are pure gold, regardless of what you think of the researcher's conclusions. A lot of the IEEE papers look particularly interesting, although I guess I'll need to pay the non-member price if I want to read them. The cited paper on rock harmonies is worth reading, if you're willing to wade through all 70 pages . Also George Zipf's book, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, which features a section on regularities within language, looks promising too in terms of being applicable to music. And it looks like I'm going to have to part with $30 for Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation.

 

Scientific Reports is said to be peer-reviewed, which is probably why articles have been retracted or pulled over the years. The organization has not been without controversy. According to Wikipedia, "In November 2017, 19 editorial board members stepped down due to the journal not retracting a plagiarised 2016 study. The article was eventually retracted in March 2018." Also: "In 2015, editor Mark Maslin resigned because the journal introduced a trial of a fast-track peer-review service for biology manuscripts in exchange for an additional fee. The trial ran for a month." (Quick sidebar: AI-generated content will make the peer-review process impossible in the future. There aren't enough reviewers to deal with the flood of content, even now.)

 

But getting back to the study itself, they're spot-on in mentioning the decrease in dynamic range. That is obvious, measurable, and pervasive. I also assume that if they used the methodology mentionedin the IEEE paper about "Content-based music information retrieval: current directions and future challenges," they could come up with meaningful results. Remember, they're dealing only with popular music, not fringe music that people like those who frequent these forums listen to  

[MathOfInsects]

4 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

 

Did you read to the end of the original PDF paper? If not, the references cited in the footnotes are pure gold, regardless of what you think of the researcher's conclusions. A lot of the IEEE papers look particularly interesting, although I guess I'll need to pay the non-member price if I want to read them. The cited paper on rock harmonies is worth reading, if you're willing to wade through all 70 pages . Also George Zipf's book, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, which features a section on regularities within language, looks promising too in terms of being applicable to music. And it looks like I'm going to have to part with $30 for Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation.

 

Scientific Reports is said to be peer-reviewed, which is probably why articles have been retracted or pulled over the years. The organization has not been without controversy. According to Wikipedia, "In November 2017, 19 editorial board members stepped down due to the journal not retracting a plagiarised 2016 study. The article was eventually retracted in March 2018." Also: "In 2015, editor Mark Maslin resigned because the journal introduced a trial of a fast-track peer-review service for biology manuscripts in exchange for an additional fee. The trial ran for a month." (Quick sidebar: AI-generated content will make the peer-review process impossible in the future. There aren't enough reviewers to deal with the flood of content, even now.)

 

But getting back to the study itself, they're spot-on in mentioning the decrease in dynamic range. That is obvious, measurable, and pervasive. I also assume that if they used the methodology mentionedin the IEEE paper about "Content-based music information retrieval: current directions and future challenges," they could come up with meaningful results. Remember, they're dealing only with popular music, not fringe music that people like those who frequent these forums listen to  

Yes, I read the paper.

 

"Peer review" means something different for open-access journals. Essentially, there is a review to determine if the underlying structure of the analysis is plausible or sound. They do not generally confront the content itself unless there is some egregious error of fact or process. Those retractions are specifically because of the lack of "real" peer-review. 

 

Open-access is generally the profit-generating component of a publication, in part or--as in this case--in whole. In other words, they are pay-to-play. There is a bias toward publication in these cases, as opposed to real journal where there is a bias toward scientific soundness of the underlying article (though there are other biases that complicate that world as well).

 

This particular analysis has a couple of very glaring flaws, IMO, right down to the thesis itself. They jumped out so immediately as to be the reason I felt I should find the original study, and then was completely unsurprised to find it in open-access. I cannot take these issues on right now but will do so later today if I get the down time. 

[Anderton]

Cool. Well, I guess my version of that paper is when I say at seminars that "every time you reach for a Minimoog bass preset, you're contibuting a reason for people to say that music's getting more boring these days."

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

Yes, I read the paper.

 

FYI, I knew you read the paper, I wasn't questioning that. I wanted to know if you read to the end, because I found all the references interesting.

[MathOfInsects]

1 hour ago, Anderton said:

 

FYI, I knew you read the paper, I wasn't questioning that. I wanted to know if you read to the end, because I found all the references interesting.

Yeah, sorry, that was a written-word thing. It sounded terse but I was replying at the end of the long quote so only meant to indicate I was answering the first part and then the second. I should have just broken the quote up like a civilized person!

[MathOfInsects]

Ok, regarding the article:
 

First, just so it's clear, they did not listen to songs or anything. There is a database called the "Million Song Dataset," and they took their information from this source. The "Million Song Dataset" is not a collection of recordings--it has no sound element. It's a massive set of annotations and descriptions of songs (only; not the songs themselves), which relate to pitch information, timbre descriptions, and loudness. 

The Million Song Dataset, when scrubbed for repeats and unreliable information, turns out to be about 450,000 songs, with none from before 1955. That's why (and only why) this article starts with that year. 

 

The data analysis the authors used checked for note frequency, and also noted (though under-weighted) pitches that were not in the key, or were not among the 12 half-steps of our Western scale. 

They also evaluated annotations regarding the nature of the sounds, and the loudness of the original track.

They found a mild decrease in the breadth of timbre descriptions and in the variety of notes used, and of course they noticed a thing we all know, which is that loudness has increased (though they don't--or I missed if they did--mention this is a result of the various media we release songs on being able to handle higher apparent volumes, not some strange development in music itself). 

So many issues to address. For one thing, of the 55 years of this arbitrary start date of 1955, 35 of them were in the era of hip-hop. Melodic analysis is comically misapplied in a genre called rap--talking. How crazy would the rest of the music of those 35 years have to have been for that chart to show no drop-off in note variety relative to harmony? And how are the annotations handling tonality in those tracks anyway? So many of those early sample beds were in slightly different pitches at the same time. If you're "correcting" for that and calling it one chord, you're fundamentally missing a pretty extreme example of note variety. Worse, if you're doing that because you assume the "corrected" version is what the producers meant, you're also writing a whole aesthetic out of the story. You're basically drawing the line to the "left" of wherever that practice is and claiming that's everything there is. 

Same with melisma, which has almost certainly increased in the last 70 years. If you underweight approach- and non-absolute tones, you under-evaluate the role that technique plays in pop and R&B. Again, you've drawn a line to the "left" of these techniques and claimed to have looked at "everything."

Regarding timbre, I would have to unpack that one farther for myself, but I can say the conclusions are pretty clearly suspect. As one of the commenters noted in response to the original journal article, it would be hard to imagine a bigger change in timbral variety than when FM synthesis first appeared. There should be a spike to the moon in that era. Also, is it possible to imagine that the era of hip-hop doesn't reflect the largest timbral shift in pop music maybe ever? There had never been a set of sounds like it. Each voice is different, each track is different. It seems unthinkable that the timbral variety of doo-wop and early rock 'n roll era was more diverse than practically any two sample-based hip-hop tracks chosen at random. I think this is another artifact of the metadata and annotation process applied to the songs of the dataset.

The real issues, though, are that 1) No one has ever said pop music is "note variety plus timbral variety plus the loudness that's all played at."  Those are things that can be looked at, for sure, but they carry literally no implicit meaning. They are entirely arbitrary, and are used by the authors solely because those are the elements catalogued in the 450,000 songs of the Million Song Dataset. It ignores rhythm and lyric density and songs where the harmony IS the melody and songs where the concept of melody is misapplied entirely and songs in other languages and so on. 

And not to mention, 2) the start date is completely arbitrary, historically speaking, and is not reconciled with what preceded it.  If you start in 1955, you start right before a period of crazy harmonic experimentation that grew out of a reaction to the sterile and same-sounding output that had come to define rock 'n roll and pop. In the middle of that experimental period were a bunch of kitchen-sink sound sources--sitar and harpsichord and flute and the like. Those are fun and some were awesome, but their time on the pop charts came and went. There were also lots more contrivances in those songs' harmony, and sometimes these were reflected in the melody, and sometimes they weren't. When they are reflected: greater note distribution. When are "ignored" by the melody: greater set of different notes relative to the harmony. But this was a very short period, historically speaking, and no one has ever said pop music has to have or not have those elements. I mean, C-Jam blues is two melody notes and an existing progression that had been used hundreds of times. The composition of the ensemble was also off-the-rack. So why doesn't it suck? (The answer is because these are not inherently good or bad measures, they are just data points that could be measured if you wanted.)

So by starting in 1955, you are giving the impression that things "used to be adventurous and aren't any more." But you might as well start a chart in a rain storm and stop it when the rain ends and say, "It used to rain more."

In fact, if you started a chart during Bach's lifetime and brought it forward to today, you'd see practically vertical drop-off of note-variety after the baroque era and a gradually decreasing trend over time. There are definitely burbles and spikes here and there, but in general the historical trend has been downward. One of the funny effects of tonality is that it makes certain things sound "wrong," that, minus tonality, would be neither right nor wrong, just "there." So by definition, the tonal era has largely been one of rallying around the home team, even if we go through periods of checking out the view from the other side for awhile. 

There are whole bunch of other elements unaddressed too. Are these all label releases? Almost nothing related to labels is central to the musical landscape in 2023 (or 2010 for the study end-date). If anything the tail is solidly wagging the dog by now (people get famous in their own ways first, then maybe get signed and maybe don't). So if you're comparing label releases, you are fundamentally comparing "all the music" at the beginning of that time span, with "just the labels" at the end of it, and there should be no surprise about homogeneity at all. 

I could go on. It's a sex-sells bit of meaninglessness that just happens to play into some people's true belief that the best our culture was at was in their youth, and since then it's been in decline. "I mean, look at these note distributions. Shameful!!"


 

[KuruPrionz]

56 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

Ok, regarding the article:
 

I'd like to point out that sometimes, recordings that were "too slow" or (rarely but it happened), "too fast" were cut with the playback speed of the tape adjusted, more for tempo than for pitch. More than once when I was a kid trying to figure out songs, I'd tune my guitar to the first song on an album and other songs on that record would be slightly out of tune, that's how I came to this conclusion regarding speed changing pitch. It's doubtful at best that somebody would slightly "adjust" the pitch of a piano for pitch's sake and I've heard that sound more than once. 

 

That's another monkey wrench tossed into the works right there. 

[MathOfInsects]

It's wrenches all the way down. 

 

[Anderton]

2 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

It's a sex-sells bit of meaninglessness that just happens to play into some people's true belief that the best our cultural was at was in their youth, and since then it's been in decline. "I mean, look at these note distributions.

 

For starters, I don't think we'll ever get a rigorous study that would produce truly meaningful, or even close to objective, results. It would take too long and involve too much subjectivity, so the results could never be truly incontrovertible. The points you make as to the flaws inherent in an undertaking along the lines they took are all valid.

 

If you look at the credentials of the people doing the research, only one of them seems to have music as a main interest. The other four are researchers in other areas. So, I doubt they approached this with a conclusion, and back-filled the data to make it agree...but who knows. Maybe they wanted publicity, but maybe they're just "what if" people. "Hey, what if we crunched some numbers with this database?" Obviously, the results are going to be limited strictly by the criteria used to build the database.

 

Perhaps the reason why the article got traction is not because it resonates with people who have a vested interest in saying "the old times were better, kids get off my lawn," but with the immese profitability of catalog sales. Someone is buying that music, and it's probably not old people - they bought it the first time around. Or all the kids with Led Zeppelin and AC/DC t-shirts. And I can't believe there are a bunch of people in Poland who are fanatics about the albums we put out in the 60s, but there are...our drummer just went over there to do interviews. WTF? So, something was appealing about that music. I'm sure it was not my boyish good looks on the album covers 

 

Trying to find out catalog sales year-by-year is like pulling teeth, but I did find this. According to BMG and Pink Floyd's official site, Dark Side of the Moon has sold 50,000,000 copies worldwide (I don't know if that includes streaming or not). As of 2013, it had sold 45,000,000 copies. Selling half-a-million copies a year for the last decade is pretty good for an album cut in the 70s. I grew up expecting generations to reject music prior to their generation, but that's not happening. They're adding it in with what's happening now.

 

Like I said earlier: "However, quantifying something objectively doesn't correlate to a subjective reaction. Buddy Holly got a lot of enduring mileage out of three chords.  What analysis can do is give a data point for why some people think 'music used to be better.' An analysis doesn't say that it was, of course. People will interpret the data subjectively, so we're back to where we started."

 

Personally, I think it's all been downhill since the 1800s

 

[KuruPrionz]

40 minutes ago, Anderton said:

Personally, I think it's all been downhill since the 1800s

 

But they didn't have Stratocasters!!!! 🤩

[Anderton]

Excellent point! But if Beethoven had Strats and Marshall stacks, would he have used that power only for good?

[MathOfInsects]

2 hours ago, Anderton said:

What analysis can do is give a data point for why some people think 'music used to be better.' An analysis doesn't say that it was, of course. 

 

But...a critical look at quotes about music at various times through history, can definitely put today's "music was better" crew in good company with...every human who came before them, at all points in Western development. 

[KuruPrionz]

1 hour ago, Anderton said:

Excellent point! But if Beethoven had Strats and Marshall stacks, would he have used that power only for good?

Maybe not but at least he could have cranked them and heard them!!!!! 

 

[Anderton]

12 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

But...a critical look at quotes about music at various times through history, can definitely put today's "music was better" crew in good company with...every human who came before them, at all points in Western development. 

 

Yes, that's why I said "some people." I'm not one of them, but only because I poke around the fringes where all kinds of interesting stuff lurks. If I lived my life via Spotify's algorithm, I would conclude that "all music sounds the same" because the algorithm is trying to push music on me that actually does sound the same.

 

Also consider this. Historically speaking, we've  been in a unique position for the past hundred years, because music ceased to be a solely real-time, evanescent entity. Now we can go back and know for sure what music sounded like in the 20s, 40s, 50s, etc. If someone wants to make an argument that music was more adventurous in the 60s, they can go back and point out hot 100 charts that show a huge diversity of musical tastes. It's clear that music has fragmented into a zillion tribes, just like other aspects of our lives. So IMHO, people have more of an emotional investment in a narrower slice of music than ever before.